Thanks to Heather Browne and the always excellent I Am Fuel, You Are Friends blog, we are once again treated to some great musical goodness. Heather shares quite a bit of great musical stuff, and you can always count on her to keep you in the loop on all things Pearl Jam, Wilco, and in this case, Counting Crows.

The band performed on World Cafe on Friday, which seems relatively normal at first mention….but it’s the setlist that they performed that made it a special broadcast. Frontman Adam Duritz decided on the eve of the performance that the band would perform a set that would exclude past Counting Crow favorites, and instead would offer a heavy preview of the band’s upcoming double CD release Saturday Nights and Sunday Mornings (in stores on March 25th.)

Performing 8 tracks from the upcoming opus, the broadcast offers Counting Crows fans an exclusive earful of what to expect from the upcoming CD.

For me, the jury is still out. This is really an album that I am holding back from latching onto, until I’ve got the full thing in my hands. This album finds me going old school – I don’t want to experience it in pieces – I want to hear it in full, so that I can fully appreciate it.

Still, the broadcast offered some interesting insight from Duritz into each of the tracks, some of which I’ve already heard via the selective tracks released by the band. I always look forward to new Counting Crows material, and the chance to try and figure out what it’s all about. And once the material reaches the live setting, I enjoy hearing Duritz’s commentary to find out how it measures up with my perceived meaning of each song.

Of the new material that was performed during the broadcast, I particularly dug the comments regarding You Can’t Count On Me, the first official single from the album.

“You keep getting sucked in by the music, and punched in the face by the reality of it. Why they chose it for our first single, I have no idea, because it’s the ugliest thing I’ve ever written about myself.”

Check out “You Can’t Count On Me” from the World Cafe broadcast and grab the entire set from I Am Fuel, You Are Friends right here.

Additional listening:

Friend Of The Devil (Grateful Dead cover)
Up All Night

(recorded live at The Warfield in San Francisco, 12/13/03)